Saturday, November 12, 2016

Howdy!

This is going to be a quick one. When flashing NodeMCU with new firmware you need to remember that esptool.py requires some params for it to work correctly. And let's not forget the flash needs to be erased before we do anything.

Friday, November 4, 2016

The story so far...

I have switched to frontend development about 10 months ago. I met a lot new friends, interesting ideas and got back to a place where you don't really need to travel half way around the world to react on someone pressing a button. That was great up until I was acquainted with JavaScript framework that I was supposed to work with. Ember.JS. I mean the idea behind it is great, don't get me wrong, but it is the tiny little details that make it a nightmare to use. Features like mixins, mustache syntax with helpers, views in God knows which location, lots of decisions pre-made for the developer (like we're not smart enough to make them ourselves, doh!) and the sick Broccoli souse on top of it - I hate Ember with a passion!

And so naturally I started looking for an alternative. First at AngularJS, then Angular2 - none of those felt like a good choice at the time. At some point I found a presentation where a scared to death person on the stage was criticizing MVC on the front end saying that's actually the wrong thing to do. That was a presentation of ReactJS. Funny enough a long long time ago I have had a conversation with one of my colleges about putting MVC to use in Delphi applications. It ended quite rapidly with me saying You're insane! and I have a strong feeling that it took 8 years for the industry to catch up with my statement.

But ReactJS felt a bit odd. And I don't mean the JSX syntax - I actually love it! But the whole shebang with Redux, functional components, state-full components - it was just a lot to take in. On top of that you needed to acquaint yourself with Webpack which at least fueled my interest in React for quite some time because of the hot module reloading. I even gave a talk about Webpack on a conference - that's how strong I feel it's a good thing

Let there be light (at the end of a tunnel)

And than, one evening, out of the blue someone posted an article on LinkedIn about vue.js. I never heard that name before, I gave it a quick read, got interested but not nearly enough to continue reading that night. Still some itch remained after I read that it was basically a simple framework. I can do simple - I actually prefer that over complex stuff - that is why I hate both Ember and JSF. A couple of days later I came back to it, read the whole user's guide in one evening and basically couldn't believe how obvious it was. I don't mean just simple (vue.js concepts are quite sophisticated at times) but just obvious. It takes all that's best from all the previous frameworks and does the same but in the right way.

Since then I have started a major project in vue.js, scaffolded with vue-cli, developed in Atom, with Java/Spring backend and I basically loved everything about it. The shorthand syntax for assigning event handlers with the @ syntax is just so fricken better than having to have 2 methods one for hooking up those events and one for unhooking them. The shorthand syntax for binding fields to views - awesome! The fact that you can have one file per component (not HAVE-TO but CAN) is such a relief from navigating millions of files in different locations in Ember. Using just properties and not custom-made this.get and this.set methods makes the code just so much more readable. But still - it's not the biggest win from using vue.js. It's how the framework structures and enforces things that makes it completely out of this world by comparison to other frameworks

A short tale of data and props

One of the biggest fuckups in all other frameworks (and in Ember in particular) is the fact that you create the API of your component when you use it. This basically means that there is no single point where you actually can do it. Not that it should bother you when you create the next "Hello, world!" but when it comes to a big project with 30 developers in it, having no definition of an API for a components and no enforcement of defining it turns on productivity after short few weeks.

Short personal note:
I have seen a presentation from a very nice girl from the Polimer project at Google where she stated that if you're going to design a new component's API make it work like a button - not like the input.

vue.js actually makes you define the API or you can't use it! It even warns you that props should actually be read-only. You get a warning in the console when you try to assign a value to it!. How cool and thoughtful is that?!

Carry on my wayward son!

I think vue.js is the first of great many frameworks I came across that actually captures what developers need to have to do their job in a professional and maintainable fashion. Back in the days there was ExtJS which has fallen into the MVC trap as well (don't know the current state of things with that one though) but otherwise none of the currently popular frameworks feel like they are good fit for the job. So if you can - try vue.js out! And if your experience is not as mine - share it in comments! I'd like to know why and if that will impact me as well.

About Me

I'm a passionate software developer with more than 15 years of experience in creating and maintaining several key software solutions. Wherever I go I spreads the word about new and updated means to satisfy the ever growing need for solving business problems.